Carmen Luke
Graduate School of Education
University of Queensland
Australia 4072
 

Discourse 1996, 17(2), 187-208.

Elvis presided over the birth of a great new means of expression, one of three such flowerings in America since World War II. The second was television from broadcast to cable to music videos. The third is the net (Katz, Wired, pp.10-14).

The lived meaning of space, time, and subjectivity has been radically altered by electronic technologies in an experience that may be described, and cannot be denied (Dery, Flame Wars, 1994, p. 19).

introduction
Something more profound than an information revolution is underway. Academic debate and social commentary about what exactly "the information revolution", "hypermedia", "techno-culture" or "cyberculture" mean in cultural, political and social terms seem to fall along disciplinary and theoretical fault lines and, not least, along generational lines. Theorists who identify with postmodern philosophical positions in architecture, geography, computing science, communication, media, and cultural studies, are engaged in interdisciplinary theorising about new hybrid social-textual and cultural forms of subjectivity, community, and knowledge. However, among scholars from disciplines traditionally concerned with the study of print textuality -- such as education and literary studies -- there is a tendency to debate media, cyberculture or information superhighway as hype, fiction, fantasy, or myth. Typically such arguments exude dismissive suspicion and tend to frame technology as 'problem' in old style unreconstructed Frankfurt School fundamentalism. They are the ones, according to Douglas Rushkoff -- author of The GenX Reader, Media Virus, and Cyberia -- who view media as a "dung heap of cultural waste" (1994a, p. 21). On the other hand, and this is the general position I will take in this paper, "those who grew up after the development of the datasphere see the media very differently. More than a set of tools, the media is an entity unto itself that must be reckoned with on its own terms" (p. 21).

What I attempt here, then, is to begin a mapping -- a cross-disciplinary linking and interpretation of various critical discussions -- of the shifts in concepts and practices from modernist print-based culture to what is now widely named information superhighway or cyberculture in relation to the kinds of issues these cultural, discursive, and technological changes raise for educators and educational theorists². I begin with an introductory sketch of the current debate about the information highway and schooling, the multimodal and multivocal dimensions of globalised media and culture industries, and Australian market penetration of communications technologies. I then turn to explore some of the conceptual and actual changes in the "lived meaning of space, time, and subjectivity" alluded to by Dery (1994) in the opening citation. Following a discussion of shifting reading/writing practices and narrative forms, I next look at the implications of emergent forms of 'edutainment': on-line and privatised learning centres and the marketing of home-based education targetted at the famiy. In the last section, I discuss the gendered dimension of computing and Internet culture in terms of current educational concerns over boys' literacy achievements.

information superhighway and the nation's schools
During the last decade, teachers, curriculum developers, and educational policy experts have attempted to deal with the impact of new information technologies on pedagogical and curriculum theory and practice. The 'technology issue' has focussed primarily on curriculum issues related to computer literacy skills instruction. More recently, Australia's somewhat belated entry onto the onramps of the information superhighway has shifted debate among educational researchers and policy makers, and politicians at all levels of government, toward larger economic and socio-political issues of the 'information revolution'. At stake are more than curriculum issues about information literacy skills, professional development for teachers, computer tax exemptions for schools, or corporate deals to put all Australian schools on-line. What is at stake is coming to terms with fundamental changes in the way we communicate, conduct our personal and work lives, organise our leisure time and social relations, and conduct the business of schooling. As Mal Lee, Managing Director of the Information Technology Education Connection (ITEC) commented at the 1995 conference on "The Information Superhighway and the Nation's Schools" :

As the nation's homes acquire greater information technology power by the day and provide the young with the chance to explore the global networks and utilise increasingly sophisticated multimedia technology, so the pressure will grow for schools to redesign their operations (1995, p. 47).

 "Redesign" is the operant word in much political and academic debate about convergence and the changing datasphere. Lee and others at the conference insisted that it will be impossible to "bolt on" the superhighway to an industrial model of schooling, curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher training. Rather than force radical policy and curriculum changes toward a convergence future, print-based industrial model schooling will need to be redesigned to effect gradual and evolutionary change. Importantly, it was claimed, children entering school today are more likely to develop multimedia literacy and information management skills outside the classroom which suggests that pressure from parents and community "will grow for schools to redesign their operations" (p. 47). I take up this point in more detail later in the paper.

Any redesign of social and educational futures in tandem with technological, social and workplace changes requires a radical transformation in the way we talk about, analyse, and conceptualise the human subject, knowledge, community, and intersubjectivity in a culturally mediated technological environment (Collins, 1995). Pivoting on the threshold of a "revolution" that implies more than just information, we are in fact hip-deep in the interdisciplinary moment of our time where the metaphors and realities of socio-cultural, technological, and media empire convergences can no longer adequately be understood or analysed through single-lens disciplinary or theoretical positions. Cultural mediation is the key here and Collins is correct in drawing our attention to its conceptual significance because in all the talk about cyberculture, the politics of mediation often get lost in both 'for' and 'against' arguments about computer mediated communication (CMC). Arguments that embrace CMC, virtual reality, and the Internet with cheery optimism and laud only its democratising, transgressive and emancipatory potential often forget or ignore the (western and masculinist) cultural codes that pervade the datasphere, its adjunct popular cultural discourse (e.g., Wired, Mondo 2000, .net, infobahn), and the 'high theory' discourses that attempt to discipline both. On the other hand, arguments that conceptualise technoculture as yet another form of social discipline and ideological control engineered in the collusion of interests between the state and capital, tend to ignore cultural mediation, grassroots diversity and cultural struggles over meaning, instead imbuing 'culture' with a monolithic, Althusserian essentialism variously named as the state or capital. Yet the transposition into the electronic datasphere of (alphabetic) writing and reading, of analog images of the phenomenal world into digital graphics, of the old dungeons and dragons and other traditional narrative forms, or even the theoretical and cultural residue that spills into contemporary academic theorising about cyberspace, attest to the culturally mediated terms of debate and the cultural (re)construction of the social and subjectivity in digital hyperspace. It is not a space without cultural memory and referents, struggle or content. Theorists as disparate as Baudrillard and McLuhan -- polar opposites on the communications-media-technology debate spectrum but sharing essentialist and determinist views of media -- both made clear that technology is less about displacement and more about convergence and "integration of functions" (McLuhan, 1964), an implosion rather than explosion (Baudrillard, 1983).

The information revolution is considered by many the most "fundamental change in textual culture since Gutenberg" (Delany & Landow (1993, p. 5) which has profound implications for concepts of knowledge, subjectivity, sociality, citizenship and community (Baym, 1995; Benedikt, 1991; Landow, 1994), literacy and practices of schooling (Green & Bigum, 1995 in press; Green & Guinery, 1994; Ingvarson, 1995; Leslie, 1993) Many educational theorists, however, view these potential implications with alarm and scepticism, a stance characteristic of unwavering commitments to ideology critique and philosophical allegiances to materialist, technology-as-social-control arguments. It seems to me, then, that in order to participate constructively in informed debate about the potential and actual consequences of the 'information revolution', requires that we resist the temptation to explain new information technologies in terms of earlier technologies, and suspend long-cherished analytic templates developed in a previous era of industrial, print-based culture. If one position can be said to characterise much of the current literature on techno-culture, CMC, or cyberculture -- particularly that authored by 'younger' scholars -- it is that traditional discipline-based analytic templates of modernist theory are inadequate for mapping, deciphering, and conceptualising the current wave of convergence -- ie., the collapse of old media empires, differentiated communication systems, and highly boundary delimited socio-cultural configurations. Meredith Bricken (1991, p. 380) talks of the importance of conceptualising "cyberspace without preconception":

A car is not simply a horseless carriage; cars have completely changed society. So have movies and TV, and so will cyberspace. The advantage of this approach is that we're open to surprise. In cyberspace already there are moments we never anticipated and experiences we never imagined. Spontaneous events occur, things that aren't designed, and indeed are undesignable.

media viruses
Alongside traditional mass media forms and genres (TV, magazines, pop singles), culture industries today have changed form, content, scope of participation, accessibility and distribution. Media and popular culture have always been, and remain, important conduits for the transmission of hegemonic cultural values, as well as for affirmations of difference by socially disenfranchised and culturally marginalised groups. Alternative discourses such as street theatre, rap, hip hop, grunge, underground journalism, raves, mediawatch programs, or the virtual communities on the Internet, give expression to other voices and identities, political agendas and cultural affiliations. Rushkoff (1994a) calls these alternative cultural forums "media viruses" which is a useful metaphor for talking about a range of differences between traditional media genres and the hypertextuality of CMC.

Media viruses are media meta-commentaries, parodies of formulaic genres, that

fight the techniques developed by public relations firms to create a passive, manipulable population...[and] prevent the 'manufacturers of consent' from exploiting 'representation as reality'. Viruses couch themselves in irony and appeal to the objective sensibilities of their viewers" (pp. 35-37).

Media viruses have been around for a long time. American programs such as Roseanne, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons or MTV, and Australian programs Mediawatch, Live and Sweaty, McFeast, Denton or Eat Carpet, are dissident metacommentaries on the oversimplification of formulaic self-same representations of social reality manufactured by mainstream news and entertainment programs. Rushkoff argues that mediawatch programs and even talk-show or tabloid TV are outlets for the public's pent-up desires to interact and participate in public debate, and to contest the reproduction of allegedly consensual mass audience beliefs. The Internet, Usenet, World Wide Web sites, computer bulletin boards, and the burgeoning home-media industries that enter the public sphere through public access TV are part of viral media culture -- forums for the articulation and spread of previously marginalised ideas and voices.

In short, media and cultural texts are no longer self-contained and bounded genres, nor are they transparent ideological control mechanisms made by an elite few for the many. In fact, the globalisation of media, information, markets, capital and cultures means that concepts such as multimodality (forms of expression), multiliteracies (modes of reading/ writing/representation) and multivocality (multiple author-voices and social identities) are more relevant today than ever. Media, popular culture, and CMC are a montage of difference, a pastiche of multiple author-voices, an endless criss-cross of quotation to other cultural texts, media forms, and symbolic languages.

The point is that mass media and popular culture are not one ideologically coherent apparatus of social discipline which we can dismiss off-handedly as uniformly 'bad', sexist, racist, homophobic, politically hegemonic and intellectually impoverished. Popular culture, media culture, and cyberculture are a multivocal and multimodal cultural billboard which the whole world is watching, consuming, continually (re)constructing and appropriating in simultaneously hegemonic and subversive ways.

The uses and consequences of information technologies and the cultural texts they encode are never an either-or proposition. In fact, the history of communications media has taught us two things: namely, that each innovation generates socially useful and socially divisive consequences, and that those consequences are a function of the uses of technology -- they are not intrinsic to its properties. Issues surrounding the advent of digital global communication orders in terms of equity of access, privacy, copyright, information rich and information poor, are as political as they were following the advent of typography and emergent book culture. However, one thing is certain: the current shift from the dual order of print-based information and electronic analog communications, to the single-order digital convergence of electronic, multimedia information and communications, is as significant as the 15th century shift from oral-scribal to typographic print culture. Yet what is extraordinary about the current 'communication revolution' is the staggering rate of what many consider a global knowledge explosion, and the speed of market penetration of computer technologies from which Australia is not exempt.

market diffusion
It is by now a postmodern commonplace that McLuhan's global village has arrived. TV saturation is close to 100% in Australia and VCR ownership (77% of all Australian households) is the second highest in the world following Kuwait. Families with children under 6 have the highest (89.4%) VCR penetration (Plunkett, 1995, p. 30). The global CNN community is spread across 100 countries and expanded global access for Australian viewers to more than six cable channels is only a matter of time. Australia has the second highest personal computer (PC) penetration per capita after the United States, and some figures suggest that Australia leads the world in Internet use on a per head basis (McCrae, 1995). Worldwide, private consumers are expected to buy 15 million PCs this year (Anderson, 1995). Households, rather than corporate or small businesses, are now the fastest-growing computer market, and computer magazines targeted at families are the most recent magazine genre on news-stands. Already, about 40% of Australian households own a PC, which is expected to rise close to 50% by 1996 (Slattery, 1995). Among Australian families with children between 6 and 11 years of age, 54.6% own PCs, and among families with teenage children, 59.9% own PCs (Plunkett, 1995, p. 30). The MIT Media Lab in Boston claims that by the year 2000 more people will be navigating the Internet than will be watching TV. Going digital means that we are currently witnessing the beginning of the end of modernist media culture: the end of TV as we know it in terms of program delivery and TV culture (Negroponte, 1995). Although household access to the Internet via home PCs is still a relatively modest 3.1% of all Australian homes (Plunkett, 1995), Australian use of the Internet and other on-line networks (accessed primarily via networked educational and worksites) is expected to double during 1996 to 1.5 million (Brewster, 1995). Given the enthusiasm with which Australians buy into new information technologies, and the accelerated speed of technological change, mass production and consequent reduced cost and market penetration, a shift within the decade from near universal TV to PC saturation is a plausible reality. This raises issues for teachers and schools who are already under community and government pressure to up their game in the technology literacy stakes. As more homes acquire computers and networking capabilities, teachers indeed will be faced by "aliens in the classroom" (Green & Bigum, 1993) -- media and techno-wise kids -- unless teachers are sufficiently trained to respond to student and parental demands. The need for public debate is paramount over issues such as the substantial resource investments needed for a national program of professional development for teachers, and the development of a coherent national technology strategy based on social justice principles to ensure equity of access, participation and outcomes.

body matter
The new economy of signs and information, and burgeoning cultural formations on the fibre optic freeways are not a phantom of the future. It is a reality, it is here now, and already bringing about profound changes in the way we work and handle information, construct knowledge, our leisure and social relations, our cultural and gender identities (e.g., Hayles, 1993). Boundaries that used to divide authoritative speakers/writers and voiceless consumers/participants, have become permeable or eroded altogether. Electronic globalism and networked CMC actualise "postmodern travel" (Probyn, 1990) and new forms "of migration across the semipermeable membranes of social life" (Carey, 1993, p. 179). For deCerteau (1984, p. 126) such border crossings constitute narrative tours and tours in narrative "between the frontier and the bridge...between a space and its exteriority". In virtual communities, markers of bodily difference and social value are invisible and irrelevant, whereas 'subjectivity' -- the construction of self through electronic textual and graphic representation -- takes on new value and meaning. In the hypermedia realm of pure information, essentialism cannot exist, and distinctions of gender, body shape or impairment, accent or speech styles don't matter. The textual coding of identity in cyberspace suggests that we may have to reconsider the analytic relevance of traditional categories of agency, and notions of social differentiation based on the cultural capital of resources and physical representation of the self. For instance, Bourdieu's concept of habitus as a site for the politics of difference may not be an adequate analytic tool for investigating 'disadvantage' or 'difference' in pedagogical relations located in a realm of pure information and pure representation. In this electronically constituted realm, "the unitary, bounded, safely warranted body constituted within the frame of bourgeois modernity is undergoing a gradual process of translation to the refigured and reinscribed embodiments of the cyberspace community" (Stone, 1991, p. 109). This is self-constitution of a different order, but no less engaged in the cultural production of identity.

Judith Butler (1990) has argued that the "culturally intelligible body" is the fundamental unit of sociality. There is no body outside historical cultural inscriptions and these occur at the level of bodily semiotics, the cultural value systems encoded in social practices, and the metanarratives that sustain those practices. All cultural production of the body is about reading and writing the body's symbolic markers to make it intelligible to and an identifiable member of a cultural group (Butler, 1990; Grosz, 1990). In that regard, identity and place marked and connected by "@" are emerging in a new semiotic, a new currency of social exchange and identity protocol. The techno-social subject makes herself intelligible to others in a different world -- a virtual but no less 'real' cultural environment of symbolic meaning within communities of variously shared affinities and interests. In this environment

S/he is constituted as part of the evolution of communications technology and of the human organism, in a time in which technology and organism are collapsing, imploding, into each other (Stone, 1991, p. 111).

cartographies
Perhaps the most profound shift is the remaking of space and place. Already, terms such as "mapping", "terrain", "cartography", "virtual geography", "datascape" or "liquid architecture" permeate debate, mostly within various strands of postmodernist theorising, about electronic techno-culture. Jim Collins (1995, p. 33) writes:

The term 'mapping' has become a theoretical shorthand used to describe the activity of envisioning cultural space in such a way that individual subjects might develop some meaningful sense of location within a foreign terrain that was once familiar but has now been rendered virtually incomprehensible by the forces of postmodernism (the arrival of information technologies allegedly having demolished traditional categories of time and space).

Virtual reality and on-line communities are giving us a virtual cartography of space but we also have mental maps -- "mental geographies" as Benedikt (1991) puts it -- of where those spaces are, where we meet, or how we get there. Harvey (1989, p. 240) also talks about the "space-time compression" of postmodernity in which traditional, objective categories of place and time have altered so substantially that "we are forced to alter...how we represent the world to ourselves". Benedikt refers to the new electronic spatiality as liquid architecture -- as a "radical transformation of our conception of architecture and the public domain that is implied by cyberspace" (p. 249). Of a new architechtronics -- "liquid architecture" -- Benedikt writes:
I use the term liquid to mean animistic, animated, metamorphic, as well as crossing categorical boundaries, applying the cognitively supercharged operations of poetic thinking....for the first time in history the architect is called upon to design not the object but the principles by which the object is generated and varied in time. A work of liquid architecture is no longer a single edifice, but a continuum of edifices, smoothly or rhythmically evolving in both space and time....[it] is a symphony in space, but a symphony that never repeats and continues to develop. If architecture is an extension of our bodies, shelter and actor for the fragile self, a liquid architecture is that self in the act of becoming its own changing shelter....It is an architecture that tends to music. The dematerialized, difficult architecture of cyberspace, fluctuating, ethereal, temperamental, transmissible to all parts of the world simultaneously but only indirectly tangible, may also become the most enduring architecture ever conceived.

His view of the new virtual cartography is a poetic vision of a world "without doors and hallways...where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighborhoods vary with the ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve" (pp. 250-51). Once the modernist certainty of location and place is undermined and reconceptualised, as Benedikt does, into an unbounded and ethereal fluidity, then a kind of poetics of postmodern subjectivity emerges. Metaphors of fluidity and permeability conceptually match the multi-dimensionality of postmodern subjectivity. Yet a politics of location -- both as cultural historical situatedness and as an epistemology of voice and standpoint -- has been crucial to debates on identity politics in postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Ethereal location in liquid spatiality coupled with the potential for identity masquerade, in turn, challenge issues of 'fixed' standpoint and location as the ground for critique and identity politics. These are epistemological paradoxes which have yet to be worked out.

The concept of time is mutating in electronic textuality. Communication on electronic bulletin boards occurs in delayed time whereas other forums such as Internet Relay Chat forums (IRCs) or Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs) enable communication in real time. Then, there is the dollars and cents economy of connect time which is where real and virtual time, and the materiality and symbolic value of currency, converge. It takes real time to type messages, search a disk, or access directories. Yet if one has the correct address of a remote site, one can be 'there' in milliseconds just like the transfer of vast amounts of data (depending on modem speed) can be almost instantaneous. This time-compressed relation to virtually any kind information, coupled with the possibility of instant access and immediate downloading into hardcopy, suggest a radically different orientation to text and information, than when one had to think about getting organised to go to the local library, check out books, bring them home, handcopy information or, in more recent years, make xerox copies of the pages one needed.

The concept privacy has also taken on new meanings (Benedikt, 1991; Collins, 1995). For example, email is both public and private, both inside and outside. Unlike paper envelopes, addresses of sender and receiver are not written as public text outside the private message, but are inside as part of the ostensibly private message body. And since all email messages are assigned traceable number codes, any message can be tracked, encrypted, and made publicly accessible. An accidental wrong keystroke to "send all" similarly unleashes the private note into the public domain.

The structure and dynamics of relationships, connections, and associations, the relationship between time and space, and traditional assumption of what constitutes community, 'the real' or 'the material' are all under challenge. Cyber-social theorists from geographers, architects, and communication scholars to sociologists, anthropologists and computer scientists are all asking the same question: "What is real in the age of virtual reality?" (Chayko, 1993).

In modern everyday life, it is difficult...to definitively classify experience as 'real or 'not real'; it is more helpful to determine the degree or 'accent' of reality in an event. The frames we once used, conceptually, to set the real apart from the unreal are not as useful as they once were; they are not as sturdy; they betray us. As they become ever more fragile, we require new concepts and understandings (Chayko, 1993, p. 178).

This new liquid architecture and cartography, the new economy of signs and community formations on the global weave of copper and glass cables, have also brought about profound changes in the way we work and handle information, construct knowledge and social relations.

workplace change
One of the main aims of schooling has always been to prepare each generation for productive participation in the workplace. Any workplace change, therefore, is important for educators and few would contest that work and community are changing in radical ways.

Modes of storing, producing, accessing and disseminating information have shifted dramatically in the last two decades from reliance on the materiality of print on paper (the discourse of the book) to electronic databases, networks, and iconic-symbolic 'languages'. These changes require new technical, social, and literacy skills with which to produce and access knowledge, and to communicate in new symbolic systems and technologies with culturally diverse groups both locally and globally. The use of CD-ROM databases or electronic mail already are commonplace in many work sites including schools. Workplaces in industry, business, the health sciences and public service sector already require of more workers more specialised technological skills and diverse media-based skills that utilise combinations of print, software-based symbolic systems, and visual imagery. Already, people increasingly are working from home as part of virtual organisations or offices: business around the corner or across town is virtually in the next room on a screen and yet a world away, accessible in seconds. For women (and men) and for people with limited physical mobility, telecommuting offers huge opportunities and new ways of workplace participation. These changes put a whole new complexion on difference of location, material circumstance, and embodied differences. Moreover, this relocation of work is beginning to erode the old distinctions between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of home and household. The market, never a force to miss an opportunity to tap into social trends, mirrors the home-work convergence back to us via ads for computer soft- and hardware which increasingly blur the distinction between home and work by semiotic blending of objects, colours, and spaces that can be read as neither distinctly a workplace nor home office but a place that is both-and.

Along with changes in communication within and among workplaces, the structure and culture of the workplace is shifting from pyramid to flattened hierarchies, from solitary workers and bosses to team-work labour and management. And although these changes are part of what is commonly referred to as the new managerialism of 'fast capitalism' or 'post-fordism' (cf. Agger, 1989; Harvey, 1989), the rhetoric of the new management discourse is paralleled by actual restructuring and different -- electronically mediated -- workplace practices that transcend national borders or nation-based economies (Pruitt & Barrett, 1991; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Paralleling workplace teams, information technologies similarly produce 'info-tech' teams, electronic workgroups, newsgroups, "net.cultures" or information collectives, which still co-exist alongside traditional forms of print-based "interpretive communities" but are beginning to replace the old notion of TV's homogenous mass audiences.

Many of today's school-aged children will inherit a very different workplace organisation and culture. Already this generation of youth are acculturated into a local and global society through membership in many different information communities of which the school and textbook knowledge are but one of diverse and competing sources of learning. The changes now underway in electronically mediated workplace and community culture suggests that schools need to reformulate definitions of literacy and forms of pedagogy that include new hybrid dimensions of meaning, knowledge production, sociality, and intercultural communication (Cazden et al., 1996). It points to the need to rethink long-cherished definitions of literacy and pedagogy that would provide ways of "making the cultural political" -- because cyberspace is an emergent cultural sphere -- through a pedagogy of multiliteracies of multi-media texts, iconography, and languages.

hybrid textualities
The increasing availability and affordability of domestic media technologies (VCRs, videocameras, PCs, CD-ROM games, photo CDs, etc.) means that children's first contact with media technologies is increasingly outside the classroom. Australian homes have made a dramatic shift towards communication technology with which schools have not kept pace. As noted earlier, increasing numbers of children enter the classroom already literate in various technological skills, media conventions or 'grammars'. While schools retain a steadfast -- if not stubborn -- commitment to print-based literacy forms, many of today's kids already access social knowledge and information through hybridised literacies.

New forms of literate practice are not simply a matter of technology: a kind of hardware and software determinism that prescribes people's communication styles and information management skills. Technologies always emerge as products of specific cultural practices, literate traditions, and interests and desires of those who design and name it. Just as early mechanised print technology emerged in hybrid form as part scribal part print discourse, so CMC is emerging as a blend of print text, sound and graphic imagery, a hybrid of the language of the book and the language of computer technology.

Book-based practices and the naming of these practices are changing: "click" or "double click" is replacing "turn the page". The term "bookmark" is common currency for clicking on and recording a World Wide Web (WWW) site -- that is, putting an electronic bookmark where there is no book. The "home page" refers to the opening screen display of a WWW "document". Yet the "document" or hypertext, which consists of "pages" and can be "bookmarked" is itself paperless and pageless. The electronic "desktop" is the interface between the phenomenal and the virtual, the material and symbolic, from where we launch ourselves through our textual constructs. Reading practices are in flux: we don't read electronic text on-screen in the exclusively bookish direction of left to right but we scroll text vertically with increasing speed and visual acuity in order to identify the gist of a message and locate keywords on which to click.

It seems then that emergent electronic reading practice and the terms in which it is named, retains parts of western cultural practices in the hybridisation of new textual and literate practices. The ubiquitous garbage can icon, for instance, found in numerous text processing software programs, is a distinctly western signifier. Only in societies affluent enough to generate garbage can the concept of trash have any meaningful association with choice to discard excess. From the point of view of societies feeding off first world refuse -- many of whom literally build communities on garbage dumps -- the garbage can carries very different cultural meanings.

The childhood market of educational and popular culture is also being redesigned and relocated. On-line websites, games, and chatgroups dedicated to discussion of sports, school projects, movies, videogames, TV programs, pop culture icons, extend the intertextual universe of learning, 'play' and popular culture, and broaden the global community of players around cultural texts and electronic objects. This is a new level of intertextuality superimposed on that realm of a distinctly more materialist form of popular culture which connects TV programs, movies, and video releases of movies, to a huge childhood market of spin-off commodities: from toys, clothing, shoes, towels, bedsheets, pencil boxes, to fast-food and softdrink tie-ins, contests, and give-aways. Part of the extension of communication, information, and popular culture into an on-line global environment is a dramatic change in narrative form, content, and traditional notions of authorship.

writing, authorship, and narrative
Rather than diminish the culturally valued practices of reading and writing, communication on Email, Usenet and the Internet have in fact generated "an explosion of writing" (Kramarae, 1995) -- "the biggest boom in letter writing since the 18th century:...Words have been decoupled from paper (Saffo, 1993, p. 48). World Wide Web sites, alt. (alternative) or rec. (recreational) newsgroups, BBs (electronic bulletin boards), and MUDs constitute a kind of global composition class, a vast textual multilogue, where participants are constructing their own writing and narrative rules and forms of expression. In fact, global electronic connectivity enables for the first time the formation of knowledge and political forums without mediating hierarchies of experts in which the roles and status of reader, writer, and critic are flexible, interchangeable and irrelevant in a context of collective cultural, knowledge, and narrative production.

Traditional narrative form -- the linear unfolding of stories and the concept of the singular and solitary author -- is undermined by multimedia authoring (cf. Douglas, 1994; Friedman, 1995; Reid, 1995; Rushkoff, 1994a). Collective storytelling is already an established genre and writing practice on Internet MUDs and MOOs (MUD object oriented sites). MUDs are open-ended on-line fantasy worlds heavily populated by an overwhelmingly male highschool and college crowd. Anyone from anywhere in the world can log on and contribute to the writing of the narrative and semiotic environment and the action or 'game plan'. The story or game can be as interactive as writer-authors decide, narrative closure can be indefinitely deferred, and an infinite number of virtual spaces, objects, rules and relationships can be included. This is the realm of pure simulation which connects "the tools of narrative to mapmaking, allowing the individual not simply to observe structures but become experientially immersed in their logic" (Friedman, 1995, p. 86).

Enabling escape from what Frederick Jameson over two decades ago called the prison house of language, simulations create an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping: a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (Jameson, 1991, p. 54). Contrary to Baudrillard's decidedly retro-modernist sentiments about the loss of the real -- evident in his conceptualisation of simulacra as artifice, as emblematic of the downward spiral of human creativity and intellect, as the implosion of cultural space though the proliferation of copies of copies whereby the original (real) is forever lost from sight -- Jameson's view of computer mediated simulation makes conceptual room for the multidimensionality of postmodern subjectivity, interactivity, and the pedagogical processes of learning new forms of connection and association. Although Jameson (1985) is also generally unhappy with the advent of postmodernity, nonetheless his view of techno-mediated simulation as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping enables us to talk about, say, children's experiences of virtual space, time, and simultaneity through narrative travel in computer simulated games. Less visually seductive, purely text based Internet communications such as MUDs or IRCs also give participants an electronically simulated sense of simultaneity, social connectedness, a sense of the 'local' community (e.g., BBs, MUDs or IRCs) within a global context of co-constructed narrative. In Friedman's (1995, p. 86) view:

Escaping the prison house of language that seems so inadequate for holding together the disparate strands that construct postmodern subjectivity, computer simulations provide a radically new quasi-narrative form through which to communicate structures of interconnection.

Other virtual sites where people co-construct narrative and social interaction are what are popularised as cybers-cafes. On-line pubs, cafes, or 'salons' are like bulletin boards: you arrive, tell everyone hello, describe where you're going to sit, what you're going to drink, and then get into the prevailing discussion. Cyber-bars and cafes organise birthday parties, bon-voyage, anniversary, or job promotion parties; people collectively 'redecorate', or 'build' extensions to existing virtual space, and so on. These narrative collectives can include as many participants, subplots, characters, and 'spaces' as writer-participants can imagine. There is no singular author defined closure, and the tapestry of visual and symbolic imagery can be as multi-embedded, culturally diverse, and cross-linked as digital technology is capable of accessing and processing. Out of the ether and back in real time, the current vogue in the material world are actual cafes and bars that provide terminals and pay-per-hour on-line services so that netsurfing can be accompanied by a cappuccino on the mousemat. Virtual and actual cybercafes constitute a whole new cultural realm of 'play' and sociality.

cyber-school
The rapid extension of play and narrative into cyberspace is no longer only the domain of computer whiz kids, programmers, academics, or research scientists. Rather, cyberspace is rapidly being settled by "ordinary" PC households (Rheingold, 1994). Unlike the earlier push to target the small business and corporate sector, the family is now the last frontier of computer marketing. Newly established computing and Internet magazines targeted at the family proliferate the newstands. Two new 1995 releases in Australia were the U.S. based Family Computing Australia, and Computer Living which markets itself as the first family computing magazines in Australia and claims to be "not just a magazine, but a way of life" (June 1995, p. 33). Marketing the 'educational potential' of new information technologies, these magazines encourage parents to explore the world of CD-ROM and on-line entertainment and education with their children, to evaluate their children's schools' computing and networking infrastructure, and to push schools to provide adequate and equitable instruction, state-of-the-art hard- and software, and networking capabilities. As an Intel ad puts it, "Children are the future...providing them with technology today that will be part of their future is essential".

The premier edition of Family PC Australia (Aug/Sept 1995) ran a special "Computers in the classroom" section featuring a New South Wales school that has successfully integrated computer learning from Kindergarten to year 12. Readers are encouraged to question teachers about student access to computing time, student-computer ratios, the age of computing equipment, networking and multimedia capabilities, available software, across the curriculum integration, and teachers' own use of computing technology ("Clue: is there a computer on the teacher's desk?"), and their information literacy competences. Where schools are lacking, parents are encouraged to "organise" with other parents to pursue improvements at their children's school, to take an active role in the school's technology planning, or "to shop around for after-school computer classes such as those offered by FutureKids" (p. 93). Clearly, the market is 'hailing' parents as new educational experts, the home and privatised "learning centres" such as FutureKids as supplementary learning sites to the school.

Parents taking charge of their children's education is nothing new. Educators have always encouraged parents to read with their children, to provide "print-rich" environments, to expose them to culturally enriching activities, to watch TV critically with them, take them to museums, and so on. Why should we assume, then, that parental investments in teaching children how to use computers, CD-ROM, or navigate through hypertext, should be any different? In fact, the Net is increasingly popular with parents who log on with their children and teach them how to find their way around the Net, how to access and participate in newsgroups, use data bases, retrieve information, and join the endless array of interactive games and narrative communities (Jones, 1995; Rheingold, 1994). World Wide Web sites dedicated to the childhood market, bridging education, popular culture and entertainment, are already well established.

Microsoft Network in conjunction with multimedia developer Big Hand Asia Pacific are currently developing an on-line chat forum called Planet Youth where children as young as four can "meet" to discuss kids' matters from sports and music to school projects, favourite toys, TV programs, trends and fashion. International Student Newswire is a student newspaper where kids upload their school or community news. KidPub publishes fiction written by kids. MidLink Magazine publishes school events and educational projects on the Internet; it includes virtual tours of schools, illustrated student articles, school news events, and teacher discussion groups. KidsCom is an online playground for the primary mob: it has quizzes, electronic penpal services, a graffiti wall where kids can post messages, and includes an information kiosk where kids can ask technical questions about the Internet. Froggy Page, predicably, is all about frogs, and Carlos' Coloring Book and Mr. Potato Head are electronic playpens for the primary and preschool mob. Cyberkids is an e-zine written by and for kids in the 12 years and older group. As well, the major art galleries, technology, science, and art museums all have entry pages constructed specifically for kids. Many provide special on-line exhibits (e.g. the Smithsonian's "Ocean Planet On-Line", and many of these sites also provide teacher guides, curriculum resources, and follow-up lesson plans.

The Internet is a new cultural realm of global "edutainment" (Williams & Bigum, 1994) which, contrary to the views of those who support political economy arguments, is not a commodity marketplace under corporate multinational control. I use the term 'edutainment' here advisedly: not in the pejorative sense of education as impoverished and adulterated through the conventions of mass media entertainment values. Rather, I use 'edutainment' to signify dynamic, colorful, semiotically rich, multiply nested, laterally connected and eminently entertaining sites for collaborative learning and input, for global discussion among kids, parents and teachers, and as a knowledge resource and learning tool which no school library or individual teacher can match.

The project of education has always been to teach children the conventional skills of literacy and numeracy. The state invests huge financial and human resources into teaching the young skills of reading, writing, and 'critical' or 'lateral' thinking: that is, making ethical and morally defensible judgements about others' and one's own social action in the world. This requires a critical understanding of, for instance, cultural diversity, the gendered subtext of society, different value and knowledge systems. Ways of thinking, and accessing and integrating knowledge 'laterally' -- the skills educators are supposed to instil in students -- are the very cognitive skills and repertoires required in hypertext navigation. Hot links are the electronic gateways to laterally connected, multi-embedded and further hot linked information resources and knowledge domains.
It is now generally agreed that CMC -- particularly navigation through the Internet -- requires a sense of intuition and a sense of lateral connectivity. In the digital information environment, and understanding of the relations among ideas is as if not more important than mastery of the ideas themselves. The expert is the one who sees and seeks the connection among related pieces of information, not the one who has the 'bare' decontextualised facts. Reading, writing, connectivity, relational knowledge, thinking laterally across associations, are fundamental to Internet navigation and information sourcing. This is rhizomatics elevated from its metaphoric subterranean but relatively localised branchings, to globally networked arterial and capillary proliferations in the electronic 'ecstatic' sphere that is cyberspace. This puts a very different spin on the acquisition of knowledge and ways of thinking about knowledge.

In my view, then, Internet resources are a form of edutainment in the positive sense: by providing access to graphically dynamic and connected knowledge, by generating communities of learners, enabling interdisciplinarity, imaginative inquiry and problem-solving rather than factual learning. It puts an end to collection code curriculum and certainly forces a revisioning of traditional forms of exclusively teacher-centred pedagogy, control and power over knowledge, and authority. Rather than view the implications of learning and teaching in cyberspace on teachers' work as threatening, I believe that it has the potential to enhance and expand teacher repertoires by taking tremendous pressure off their shoulders to be the sole source of classroom knowledge and interpretation. Moreover, the networked teacher -- the infonaut charting a course with her students across the vast terrain of Internet communities, databases, and WWW sites -- can connect with other teachers in on-line professional communities and thereby mediate the sense of isolation inherent in teachers' work. CMC and the networked classroom, as Williams and Bigum (1994, p. 15) argue, does not "replace the older education and information activity in schools any more than manufacturing and industry replaced agrarian activity. Digital information flows lay over the material flows and practices of schooling". As I noted at the beginning of this paper, the information revolution is a technological and cultural shift, a gradual but nonetheless historically 'speedy' (Plunkett, 1995) transformation that retains but reframes traditional referents and practices.

I now wish to turn to my last section to discuss the gendered dimension of globally networked electronic textuality as a way to explore a current educational issue -- that of boys' literacy -- and relate that to the politics of technologically mediated gendered literacy practices. In closing, I return to the issues and implications for education that I have raised in this essay.

gendered culture and power in digital hyperspace
Despite claims that CMC democratises access and participation by eliminating difference -- that is, the visibility and social values attributed to distinctions of gender, race, ethnicity, dialect, and other embodied features -- the gendered discourse of CMC is unmistakable male, fuelled in large part by a global army of male cyberpunks, techno-junkies and web-heads. The gendered register, style, imagery and content of on-line communications, computer software languages, CD-ROM entertainment, and the adjunct print discourse (e.g., Wired, Mondo 2000, .net) on cyberculture computing and net surfing gear, is decidedly male. CD-ROM games (e.g., Cyber Strike, Dark Forces, Alien vs. Predator, Dragon Spires, Doom, and hundreds more) are developed by men for men. According to many feminist scholars, the thinly veiled misogyny of countless alt.sex discussion groups, cyborgasmic or cyberotica references and ID codes or sigfiles, and the electronic tidal wave of downloadable pornography, makes cyberspace a realm that women navigate with caution (Balsamo, 1994; Herz, 1995; Mistiaen, 1995; Spender, 1995; Taylor, Kramarae & Ebben, 1993). However, this is not to suggest that all women are intimidated by potential email stalkers, abusive flaming, or electronic cross-dressers. There are hundreds of women's BBs, newsgroups, and WWW sites that are safe, friendly and 'nice places to meet'. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of women worldwide are part of cyberpunk virtual subcultures (Balsamo, 1994; Herz, 1995), women in academics, business, and the arts use the net for work (Hopkins, 1995), and women BBs systems operators proliferate the net. However, despite a substantial women's presence on the Internet, the gendered politics of representation that define much of the content and terms of debate about CMC and cyber-culture, are as apparent and powerful in the electronic heartland as they are in the traditional paradigm of material, print and media popular culture. What, then, might this mean in terms of boys' literacy? Let me first set the context of debate.

In Australia, boys' literacy is a current issue of considerable and controversial concern. Now that girls' achievement rates are more or less equal to, and in some content areas better than, boys, the federal research dollars are targeting boys. Among the arguments that explain boys' generally low achievement in basic literacy skills is a perceived underdevelopment of their fine motor skills, considered crucial in writing skills. Further, reading and writing are said to be culturally perceived as feminine activities and hence not in the same league of robust male activity. The traditional male content areas of science require hands-on learning and concrete production, whereas humanities study is primarily about reading and writing about abstract issues related to history, literature, culture, or the social. Gendered differences, then, in literacy achievement are seen as the consequences of socialised differences, and of differences in the cultural valuing of school knowledge and skills.

Yet, if we look at the culture of networked CMC, who rules the superhighways and wired colonies? Computer culture is close to a women-free zone: from programming to product design, from its historical roots in military discourse to its civilian face in academia and corporate consumer sector. Yet across the vast netscape of virtual communities, men not only outnumber women, but they are prolific writers, stylists of sophisticated narratives, crafters of slam-dunk pop culture commentary and the new cyber-speak. In other communities, mostly those with academic welcome signs, men also tend to clutter the electronic space but there they tend to reproduce the long-winded textual deliveries we are all familiar with from the discourse of the academic journal and formal lecture from the podium. The textual and semiotic posturing of masculine authority is no different in the electronic cafe as it is in the campus coffeeshop or lecture hall. In cyberspace, then, the "explosion in letter writing", and proliferation of textuality more generally, is predominantly men's cultural production (cf. Kramarae & Taylor, 1993).

There are no hard and fast figures for the demographic profile of the settlers on the new electronic frontier, and estimates vary, but it is commonly assumed that about 80-90% of Internet users are white, male and mostly between ages 17 to 45 (e.g., Baym, 1995; Hayles, 1993; Rheingold, 1994; Taylor, Kramarae & Ebben, 1993; Wajcman, 1994). With more than 30 million users worldwide (predicted to double by 1997) and close to 2.5 million computers on the Internet, it's obvious that the electronic frontier is overwhelmingly a male society. Clearly, then, arguments about diminished or undeveloped literacy skills among males do not hold in the context of the sheer demographic weight of a 30 million member community constructed around reading and writing relationships -- and, not least, keyboard typing skills!

But to return to the issue of gendered literacy. Perhaps it's not a question of boys' lack of interest in reading and writing, or their refusal to partake in what are seen as feminised activities which is leading to boys' lower literacy achievement. Perhaps it is partially a question of difference in the medium that variously discourages or encourages boys' reading and writing production. Granted, different media support different kinds of representational systems and textual genres, and CMC certainly enables a range of expressive genres (via graphic, semiotic, symbolic imageries and sound) not available in alphabetic print discourse. But, genre options -- the availability in CMC of many modes of communication and representation -- do not in themselves account for the fact that males are keen writers in CMC modes but are not prolific writers in the discourse of non-electronic print (including handwriting). If gendered differences in reading and writing are associated with the mediating features of the technology, then what is it about CMC that is so attractive to men and boys?

Males are said to be attracted to computers because of their technological features (Kramarae, 1995; Turkle, 1984,1988; Wajcman, 1991). Males socialise around computers much as they socialise around sports: it's a culture of pats on the back, bonding through insider knowledge, scoring points, rewards for winning, and the challenge of technical risks. Men surf the net "for the beauty of it, to explore its limitless possibilities, and, above all, to enjoy the challenge of making it work. Women, on the other hand, are said to be less enamoured with the technical features and tend to use computers for more pragmatic purposes. They use it to communicate, or as a tool to do their work more efficiently" (Mistiaen, 1995, p. 55)

Although I do not agree with arguments that attribute essentialist cognitive repertoires to women and men, gendered socialisation patterns do create different relations to highly gendered bodies of knowledge among boys/men and girls/women. Some feminist scholars, in fact, see the new electronic social and knowledge communities as particularly amenable to women, as a place of simultaneity, self-organisation, groupness through cooperation, a horizontal network of lateral 'click' connections without an authoritative centre of (male) control (cf. Spender, 1995). Historically, male technological control and know-how may well have placed them at the centre of technological innovation and in control of the knowledge industries that support technological development, production, and application. However, the 'soft' textual and discursive side of hardware -- while unmistakably male -- reflects a very different orientation towards multimodality, multivocality, a blending of print, image and sound, a fascination with open-ended and lateral connectivity, with relational knowledge. This orientation, and the culture and discourses within which it manifests, is qualitatively different in kind from that commonly attributed to masculine "ways of knowing" and representational modes, often characterised as atomistic, linear, and disconnected.

What this suggests, then, are two things: first, established categories within feminist critique of patriarchal knowledge regimes may need some critical revisions in light of the arguments I have raised about primarily male-authored relational and dynamic structures of knowledge and communication now emerging in electronic information networks such as the Internet and WWW. Second, if males' print literacy skills of reading and writing are less inhibited by the technological features of CMC, then clearly this points to a renewed impetus for putting a networked computer at the disposal of every student for the benefit of overcoming boys' socialised perception of reading and writing as 'effeminate' activities, as well as for overcoming girls' socialised apprehension of computer technology.

multimedia-scapes and multiliteracies
Looking to the immediate future, it is clear that new technological innovations and communication systems convergence are shifting the boundaries of what used to be clear-cut divisions between communications and information, presence and absence, text and imagery, corporate producers of media texts and passive audience consumers. These new media spaces provide access for cultural representations and public sphere debate to groups previously excluded from the airwaves and microwaves, and they undermine the concept of collective media audience, common culture, and a homogenous politics. Global connectivity through digital technology enables for the first time the showcasing of diverse language, social, cultural (and subcultural) groups who are able to self-determine their forms of representation and identity, rather than being framed by dominant discourses as other, as cultural curiosities or fringe dwellers. Media interactivity, global connectivity, and the shifting boundaries of media forms (e.g., telephony, computing, TV) and audiences, enable new forms of culturally diverse citizenship -- "netizens" -- to participate in public discourse, to be 'heard' and made visible to increasingly fragmented, specialised, yet globally connected audience segments.
Surfing across the TV channels or the Internet, ambling along the electronic mailboxes, or 'clubbing' around with bulletin board pals, is itself a kind of cultural tourism that both requires and teaches us new ways of thinking about and interacting with others, new language and representational codes (e.g., :-) etc.), new forms of social and cultural "netiquette". These new kinds of multilogues, new forms of print and symbol-systems literacies have enormous implications for pedagogy, student learning, and classroom dynamics.

Students connected to an on-line site who work with classmates down the hall, across the country or from around the world, can collectively retrieve information from on-line databases or from discussion with 'world experts' on a topic, are able to collaborate on the production of a text or project which can be shared with thousands of other students and teachers anywhere in the world. The ability to import, download, drop and drag text and imagery from an inexhaustible global library of information creates new skills, processes, and forms of textual production that encourage interdisciplinarity, collaborative authorship, editing, critique, reading and writing. Drawing on existing representational resources, the production of knowledge through the virtual library of Internet resources is a kind of bricolage -- a multimodal, densely semiotic, and transcultural interface among culturally diverse people and groups, between human subject and data object, and enabling of new relationships between presence and absence, appearance and representation, prose and the poetic. The virtual classroom does not replace the teacher or classroom but, as I have argued, it certainly puts traditional concepts of teacher authority, timetabling, disciplinary divisions, curriculum, pedagogy, and the linearity of print-based textbook learning, into question.

What today appear as hybrid and frontier media forms and content will be commonplace in the near future, and will generate new text-based social repertoires, communication styles, and symbolic-semiotic systems for accessing and participating in new knowledge and cultural configurations. Consider, for instance, that just to get into any basic computer program requires facility with both print literacy and any number of symbolic-iconic languages so that we know where to click in order to move through menued choices. Already, we take that kind of literacy for granted. In that regard, it becomes apparent how crucial our pedagogical mission as educators is if we are to prepare kids with the critical tools necessary to participate ethically and productively in these new forms of sociality.

Granted, not all families initially will have equal access to all these new sources of information. But invariably, as history has shown, mass marketing and production reduce costs and sooner or later, almost everyone owns a telephone, calculator, walkman, TV, VCR, camcorder, or PC. And I say this mindful that the historical spread of communications technologies is always uneven and always excludes some groups, and that not all people choose to buy into technological innovations. However, the new social interface -- accessible to anyone anywhere who is connected to the infobahn via computer, modem, an account and password -- must also be viewed with caution.

Critical analysis of the culture and politics of the wired netscape is crucial at a time when "homesteading on the electronic frontier" (Rheingold, 1994) -- the colonisation of cyberspace -- is still in relatively early stages. The Internet is still very much a 'construction site', a dirt road as some say, rather than a superhighway. At the level of government policy pronouncements, public debate or academic theorising, it seems that we barely have one issue on the table, before a constant stream of new issues and concerns emerge before old ones are adequately debated and worked out. There is much to learn to even get into the debate in order formulate informed and critical responses. In the meantime, government decision making, corporate mergers, market penetration, technological innovation, WWW construction, and massive migration to cyberspace outposts are proceeding at a phenomenal rate. Typically, by the time commentary such as this becomes publicly available through the arduous review and publication process of the academic print journal (rather than an on-line electronic journal), the 'facts and figures', referents and terms of debate will have invariably shifted in both subtle and substantial ways. It is vital, therefore, for educators and educational theorists to take a broad view, to approach "cyberspace without preconception" in Bricken's words, and not to veto the possibility that postmodern theorists may have something relevant to say about this generation's cultural embeddedness in 'the information revolution' -- itself a decidedly generational term. On the other hand, we need also to keep a critical eye on the enthusiasm with which the federal and state governments are embracing a particular rhetoric of 'enhancement', 'economic competitiveness', 'value added' and so forth, while at the same time engaging in corporate deal-making and policy decisions at such warp speed that it becomes increasingly difficult for researchers, let alone ordinary citizen-consumers, to keep up and develop responses for engagement in public debate.

It is imperative that educators take the broadest possible perspective for at least two reasons: first, to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of how information, knowledge, communication, subjectivity, sociality and community, and literate practice are being technologically mediated and culturally reconfigured; second, to participate -- and not just from the vantage point of side-line critique -- in debates about the development of an inclusive and morally just ethics of electronic communication, representation, participation, and community building. We need to make sure that debate about information culture, clever country, the wired classroom and emergent forms of privatised and home-based electronic schooling does not drift away from considerations of the social, cultural, and political consequences of new communication orders, forms of subjectivity, sociality and community. This, then, must be a central part of a critical literacy, one that goes beyond the instrumental use value of information literacy skills, and engages students in deliberation about new hybrid information orders, about contextual issues of globally differentiated access, the politics of knowledge, privacy and intellectual property, cultural diversity and virtual identity, 'ecstatic' textuality and community, and prepares students to think and act ethically in the virtual classrooms and workplaces of the near future.

In this country, schools, teachers, and students are already on-line by the thousands. Kids are reading and writing stories, doing projects, learning from each other and with kids from around this nation and the world. The new electronic globalism puts cultural diversity, multimodality, intertextuality, and multiliteracy right at our children's fingertips. Technology and the domain that is cyberspace are nothing to be feared but they do require that teachers bridge the generational knowledge gap in order to travel with and guide the young into this new environment with confidence and enthusiasm, but always with a critical eye to the shifting politics of knowledge, access and participation.

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endnotes
 
1 The Greek word ekstasis means standing outside or beyond oneself. Baudrillard first used the term "ecstacy" in relation to the "hyper-real" of electronically mediated communication in The ecstacy of communication (1984).  According to Baudrillard, in an environment where nothing is hidden or secret but all is made public, transparent and excessively visible through the spectacle of mass media, information and communication implode into an ecstatic obscenity: a total exteriorisation of being outside and beyond itself.  Baudrillard was talking about non-interactive mass media, particularly TV.  Electronic textuality, subjectivity and sociality in networked interactive  communication systems such as the Internet are also ecstatic: "An ecstatic document is one whose value is not what lies within it but what it points to ....You read it not so much for what it shows but for the links it shows you to other information.  This change in documents is itself ecstatic -- it points beyond itself to changes in our culture at large -- for documents can condition our way of thinking and acting in vastly different ways" (Weinberger, Wired, 1995, p. 108).  My use of the term 'ecstatic' accords with Weinberg's notion of exteriorisation.

Cybernetics is the study of human control functions and of mechanical and electrical systems designed to replace them.  It is derived from the Greek word kybernetes which means a pilot or navigator of a ship, and hence is associated with concepts of travel and steering.  William Gibson first coined the term cyberspace in Neuromancer (1984), which explored the sense of virtual space and place, and the cultural formations behind the screen and inside the video games then sweeping the country.  A useful definition of cyberspace is offered by Novak (1994, p. 225):  "Cyberspace is a completely spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing systems, along pathways provided by present and future communications networks, enabling full copresence and interaction of multiple users, allowing input and output from and to the full human sensorium, permitting simulations of real and virtual realities, remote data collection and control through telepresence, and total integration and intercommunication with a full range of intelligent products and environments in real space".  My use of the term "cyberia" is meant to denote such a realm of technologically and textually mediated virtual co-presence and interaction, and derives from Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia (1994b).
 

2  I limit my discussion to debates about and implications of cyberculture and computer mediated communication (CMC) to 'first world' contexts, mindful of the politics of capital that underwrite the information-rich/information-poor, north/south, east/west axes of economic disparity.  My argument about the new electronic globalism, therefore, should be read in this delimited context.
 
 

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